SHJ: Magazine ranks Woodruff High one of best in U.S.
Congratulations Teacher, Faculty, and Students of Woodruff High for being listed as one of the nation’s best High Schools by US News & World Report. You make our area and our state very proud. Here’s the article from the Spartanburg Herald Journal:
Magazine ranks Woodruff High one of best in U.S.
By Ashlei N. Stevens
Published: Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Woodruff High School has been listed among “America’s Best High Schools,” according to a new report by U.S. News & World Report magazine.
The report rates Woodruff and 14 other South Carolina high schools among the nation’s best 1,591 public high schools. Woodruff High School is the only high school in Spartanburg, Cherokee and Union counties recognized in the report. Polk County High School, located nearby in North Carolina, also was recognized as a bronze-level school.
U.S. News & World Report is known for ranking the nation’s top colleges, but this is the first time they’ve released one on high schools. The full report is available at www.usnews.com/highschools and will be included in the Dec. 10 issue.
“We wanted to give schools who were outperforming some recognition,” said Andrew Rotherham, who helped devise U.S. News & World Report’s ranking methodology.
The report analyzed 18,790 public high schools in 40 states using data from the 2005-06 school year. The study evaluated how students in schools performed on state tests, how disadvantaged students performed, and how successful the school was in providing college-level coursework. Ten states were not included because they didn’t make their data available or they provided insufficient information.
The top 100 Schools received a “gold” designation, the next 405 schools are receive a “silver” designation, and an additional 1,086 schools earned “bronze.” In South Carolina, the Academic Magnet High School in Charleston was the lone state school to receive a gold designation and was ranked number 27. There were four schools in this state deemed silver, while Woodruff was among 10 schools in South Carolina listed as bronze.
Polk County High School in North Carolina was one of the 34 schools in that state to receive recognition. Polk County received a bronze designation.
Woodruff High principal Karen Neal said she’s “tickled” with the rating.
“I think the fact that it’s based on achievement, it does affirm the success that we’ve had academically,” Neal said. “It’s a good thing that says everybody’s working and everybody’s experiencing some success.”
This is the second national report in which Woodruff has been recognized. In May, Spartanburg and Woodruff high schools were among the top 1,200 high schools in the country, according to Newsweek magazine’s 2007 listing, ranked 707 and 798 respectively. The Newsweek report ranked schools according to participation in advanced courses.
However, Rotherham, who serves as co-director of an independent education policy think-tank, said the most recent ranking is perhaps a fairer measure because it looks at whether schools are outperforming other high schools within their state and whether disadvantaged students are outperforming their peers in the same state.
“The difference is, we pre-screen the schools, and they had to be statistically outperforming state averages and state expectations in the first place,” he said. “There are some schools on the Newsweek list that have appallingly high dropout rates and an appallingly high gap between different groups of students.”
Woodruff serves about 850 students in grades nine through 12, and of those, nearly 43 percent meet federal requirements to receive a free or reduced-price lunch, an indicator of poverty. It was the only high school in the state to earn a National Blue Ribbon in 2005 from the U.S. Department of Education, and the school was among only 20 in the state that earned an “excellent” rating on school report cards released last month.
Figures from North Carolina show black students and poor students performed better on end-of-course tests at Polk County High than the statewide average. Seventy-one percent of black students passed (52 percent statewide), while 66 percent of poor students passed (57 percent statewide). Polk County High was one of the bronze schools to meet the first two criteria, but it didn’t meet the college-readiness criteria based on Advanced Placement tests.
The Hendersonville, N.C., Times-News contributed to this report.
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